ZU lab aims to decipher gene regulatory programs of the mammalian brain and accelerate drug discovery for neurological diseases by integrating artificial intelligence with single-cell techonologies.
We welcome applications from PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who are excited about advancing neuroscience through AI and single-cell technologies. Relevant prior publications are available here. If you're interested in joining the lab, please contact Dr. Songpeng Zu.
Recent advances in single-cell technologies have revealed thousands of distinct brain cell types. Understanding the gene regulatory programs that define these cell types is key to uncovering how the brain functions and to developing targeted treatments for neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. By integrating large-scale single-cell multi-omics data from mammalian brains, we develop computational methods to decode cell-type-specific regulatory programs and identify their core transcription factors."
Learn More: Nature 2023
Deciphering gene regulatory programs relies heavily on multimodal epigenetic information—such as chromatin accessibility, histone modifications, and DNA methylation—in a cell-type-specific context. To this end, we explore diverse deep learning frameworks to predict epigenetic features directly from raw DNA sequences and evolutionary conservation across species.
Learn More: Nature 2023
Developing new drugs typically takes over a decade and costs millions of dollars. We believe this paradigm is shifting, driven by high-throughput drug screening, large-scale datasets of drug bioactivities, and rapid advances in AI-powered chemoinformatics. Our lab applies single-cell sequencing technologies, chemoinfomatics, and artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design, including target discovery, compound optimization, and drug combination strategies.
Learn More: Bioinformatics 2015 Bioinformatics 2016 Bioinformatics 2020
